


There’s a River I Would Like to Tread

by badfaithed



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2018-08-29
Packaged: 2019-07-04 05:13:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15834438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badfaithed/pseuds/badfaithed
Summary: When Harry and Draco run into each other after four years of maintaining a professional and respectful distance, they discover they are not so dissimilar after all.





	There’s a River I Would Like to Tread

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this when my flight was delayed - it’s not very good but I hope you enjoy it anyway!

Harry sees him in the corner of his eye when he enters the coffee shop. Almost as if feeling his gaze, Draco lifts his head from his book and gives him a little nod before returning his attention to his novel. Harry gives a small smile in return, despite Draco not being able to see it. He heads to the counter and gives his order - there’s a certain comfort he takes from Muggle places; they never recognize him. To them, there is nothing ordinary about this raven-haired man with green eyes, and the cut on his forehead is perhaps just a remnant of a rough childhood when he had tripped and fell. And that’s okay. That’s better, even. Harry feels a sense of freedom rise in him as the lady passes him his order and a napkin with nothing more than a friendly nod, and murmurs an offhand thank you. 

Anonymity. Some people would feel uncomfortable when they were the stranger in a room of many, but in this kind of environment, Harry feels uncaged, almost. Clean. As if he has washed himself momentarily of his duties and his role, of what he has done and what he is, what he will be and what people are looking for in him. It’s refreshing. Even in his school years, he had been continuously discomfited by the attention he got, and after the war, he feels perhaps even worse than before. A lingering survivor’s guilt, a streak of memories of all the crying faces. As opposed to the pressure that the wizarding community subconsciously exerts on him, there is no one here that he knows. Except Draco, he supposes, glancing at the blonde as he slips a sleeve onto his cup. But Draco never reacts to him the same way the faceless masses do. And that too, is comforting. Shrugging internally, Harry approaches the man.

“Can I sit?” he asks genially. Four years of watching Draco react to the people around him at work told him that he was a person who liked his personal space. Draco observes him for a second before nodding. “Nice of you to ask,” he comments without malice, closing the book and instead looking at Harry.

“As opposed to what people seem to think, I’m not completely brash,” Harry replies dryly, not bothering to tone out the bitterness in his voice. His superiors fancied him thoughtless, but most of the time it was only because he was inclined to disagree with them. Okay, maybe he was a little impulsive, but still. The higher ups at the Ministry have probably decided that after all the changes Harry Potter And Company had incited in the system, it was time to stop him. As Draco reaches for his own cup, Harry wrinkles his nose at the half-finished beverage. “Doesn’t it get cold?” “A little,” Draco answers, resting the paper cup on Harry’s hand for a second to let him feel the slightest bit of warmth left in the drink. Harry makes a face as Draco sips from the cup calmly, almost making a show of the fact that he found the lukewarm coffee perfectly fine.

As the air threatens to dwindle into silence that Draco seems to be completely comfortable with, Harry opens his mouth to initiate some kind of small talk. Before the “how’s work” slips from his lips though, Draco talks first, his grey eyes unreadable as he stares at the full-length windows the shop has.

“Do you think we used to hate each other, or just what we assumed of each other?”

Harry blinks. It’s surprising what he decided to talk about, but perhaps not. They’ve never actually had a proper conversation in the past few years, their interactions limited to when work brought them together somehow, discussions mostly just including hellos and see you laters and what supplies do you need and maybe a few quips here and there. Green eyes flickering from Draco to the ceiling, Harry gave the question a honest thought. After the war, the hatred that he once felt for one Draco Malfoy had dulled into a blunt spike of confusion with the occasional bout of spite, he supposed, when he wanted to blame something. It was - almost amusing, how they saved each other’s lives after Harry had cursed Draco’s existence so many times in school, and probably vice versa. And then when the war ended, Harry had shelved those memories somewhere into the back of his mind, left not to touch. He assumed that their meetings afterward would be awkward, but Draco had acted as though it had never happened. Or maybe Draco just hadn’t found the whole thing as shocking as he did.

“Do you think we really knew each other?” Harry replies instead, pondering out loud. Draco tilts his head at him in response before speaking. “Answering a question with a question, I see,” he remarks. The lack of inflection in his voice made Harry uncertain as though whether it was meant to be scathing or just a teasing comment, though a small curve of Draco’s lips a second later told him it was the latter. “I suppose not.” Draco continues. “I thought you were desperate for attention, dumb, unthoughtful, and probably more nastier assumptions. I see now that I was wrong.” Draco rests his head onto his fingers, as if measuring Harry’s response to his frank admission.

Harry doesn’t try to hide his surprise, just lets it slip through anyway. Draco didn’t think he was those things. He supposed in the back of his head he had already known, but it was reassuring, almost, to hear it in words. He found he liked it when people said things out loud; to him it made them more concrete.

Harry is about to reply when Draco speaks again. “It was very easy for me to hate you,” he says, voice completely steady like water on a lake like he was stating an unanimously agreed fact. Harry smiles now, unusually wryly. “I guess it was the same for me.” he acknowledges. He stares down at his cup, reflecting. “There were... a lot of assumptions made,” Harry allows, watching a curl of smoke twisting up from the liquid. Almost like a snake, he thinks absently, tracing its path with his eyes.

Draco hums in agreement, and sips the last bit of coffee from his cup. Harry feels, somehow, a flicker of disappointment, at the prospect of the other man leaving. Their discussion had been enlightening, almost. “Are you going now?” he can’t help asking, and Draco shakes his head. “Came here to read, and was disturbed by you. Still need to finish my book, don’t I?” “Hey,” Harry starts immediately, but he stops himself when he catches the faint amusement in Draco’s gaze. “You were joking,” he says after a second. “Yes,” Draco agrees lightly, and returns to staring at the glass windows contemplatively. Holding back the urge to roll his eyes at the man, Harry, too, drinks a little more of his coffee. 

“Condolences about your breakup,” Draco says after about a minute. Harry is almost confused for a second before realizing he was talking about Ginny. They had broken up a few months ago, and the media had gone crazy. Dimly he thinks that needing a second to recall the event probably meant he didn’t mind it very much. Either way, he didn’t expect Draco to know, but he supposes working in an environment with so many magical folk made the event hard to miss. “It really wasn’t that big of a deal,” Harry answers. “It felt like it was a long time coming, actually.” Draco turns to him again, surprised for a moment before his face morphs back into that unidentifiable state of thinking. “Wasn’t working out?” Draco asks, his voice very gentle now. Harry realizes with a start that he has probably never heard Draco use such a tone of voice before. “We were never meant to be together, I don’t think.” Harry replies, and his own honesty surprises himself. Staring at the cup in his hands, he feels the black truth spill from his lips before he can stop it, unraveling like thread from a spool. Perhaps it’s because he’s never said these things out loud. But he has a strange sense in his subconscious that Draco would understand.

“I’ve thought for a very long time now that perhaps we only stuck together because that seemed like the most likely possibility. Or maybe because we were looking for someone to hold on to in the mess that was the war, and we were just conveniently by each other. Like how you would hold on to the person next to you mindlessly if you were about to drown. Maybe we only stayed together because it was the expected thing to do. I feel like I only really started getting to know her after we got together, which is dumb. Maybe you were right about me being dumb. I don’t know.” Harry doesn’t bring himself to meet Draco’s grey eyes. When he raises his gaze to meet the miniaturized storm of Draco’s own, he is almost startled by its intensity.

“You’re not allowed to say that again,” Draco says after a moment. Harry is confused for a second; Draco continues quickly enough. “That you’re dumb. That’s not true.” Harry is about to interrupt and argue but Draco keeps going. “I think I’ve realized after so long that just doing what people expect of you is such a ridiculous disservice. To them, to know it’s not sincere. To yourself, it’s a waste of energy and time and feelings. And sometimes it results in a such a-an unnecessary sacrifice.” Harry feels concern break onto his expression when Draco’s voice shakes and stops, as if he’s trying to regather his thoughts, and Harry realizes that he must be talking about him being a Death Eater. “Voldemort,” Harry says unhelpfully, and Draco glares at him, eyes all forceful and steely and hard, and Harry wants to hit his head on the table. Why’d he have to say that? 

The silence is uncomfortable this time, and Harry wants to reach out and hold onto Draco and tell him it’s fine, it’s okay, but right now the situation feels as delicate as a butterfly’s wing and Harry almost wants to hold his breath, watching Draco’s profile as his face settles back into a mask of nothing. Despite all the noise around them, and the music playing in the backdrop, Harry feels locked out of it. As if he is in a tiny space with Draco next to him, and if he does anything wrong Draco will break those nonexistent walls and shift into nothingness, and they would resume the meaningless routine chatter at work. Harry doesn’t want that. And so Harry doesn’t just sit and wait for Draco to move or to speak.

“Sorry,” Harry says. 

Draco turns to him now, and exhales a long breath. “Okay,” he answers after a long moment. “You’re right, of course,” he says, and Harry recognizes that this is a confession that Draco hasn’t made to anyone in a long time, perhaps not at all. “I wish I had never taken the Dark Mark, sometimes,” he smiles without humor. “But then I guess that’s a part of who I am now. And I can’t change anything and I probably shouldn’t ever try to, because without that I would lose a part of myself now, however much I hate the fact. I wonder how I had once mistook that rotten duty for honor. It was a mistake, and a very great one. I paid for it.” he stops as if to recollect himself, grey eyes glinting. “Maybe even now I don’t know what I’m doing or what I want, and neither do you, but I’m living for myself now. I wish you could do that, too.”

Harry looks at Draco, really does, and remembers Draco when he first met him in Madam Malkin’s, arrogant and proud and amazingly annoying but still young and naïve, and himself, uncertain but headstrong, self-convinced of his justice and his own rightness, and how so much is different. How the years had sifted away like fine sand through fingers, their flow taking both its toll on them and leaving their own kind of experience and kindness. How so much has changed, how the world has, how they both have. And Harry can’t help the warmth rising in his chest, and it’s incredibly foreign and strange because it’s happiness for and because of Draco Malfoy, but he concludes after a moment he doesn’t mind it very much; or at all, really. He lets what he knows is a goofy expression appear on his face, and before Draco can shift away out of caution, he reaches towards him takes his hand.

“Thank you, Draco,” Harry says with feeling, and Draco’s surprise is evident across his pale features, though it dims in a few moments to tenderness. Harry feels his own smile brighten when Draco allows himself one, though he turns his grey eyes to the table out of what was probably embarrassment.

“Drink your coffee, it’s getting cold.”


End file.
